The administration in Assam’s Sonitpur district ordered five declared foreigners to leave the state within 24 hours on Wednesday.

The five residents of the Dhobokata village – Hanufa, Mariyam Nessa, Fatema, Monowara and Amjad Ali – were issued the order under the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

The Act grants power to district commissioners and senior superintendents of police to expel “illegal migrants” from the state by bypassing the foreigners tribunals.

In notices issued on Tuesday, Sonitpur District Commissioner Ananda Kumar Das told the five persons that “being a declared foreigner, your presence in India/Assam is detrimental to the interest of the general public and also for the internal security of the state”.

Sonitpur foreigners tribunal had on October 24 declared the five persons as foreign citizens in separate cases filed by the Tezpur superintendent of police (border) in 2006.

Das directed them to leave the state through the Dhubri, Sribhumi or South Salmara-Mankachar routes.

The notices also directed the authorities to delete the names of the five persons from the electoral rolls, cancel their ration cards, freeze or cancel their Aadhaar cards and remove them from all government schemes.

The district commissioner warned that if the five persons failed to comply, the authorities would take action to remove them from Assam under the 1950 Act.

In September, the Assam Cabinet approved the framing of a standard operating procedure under the Act. Earlier, cases pertaining to undocumented migrants were handled by foreigners tribunals.

Sarma had said that the standard operating procedure to use the 1950 Act had been approved, which would, to a large extent, “nullify” the role of the foreigners tribunals.

Foreigners tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. However, the tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and of declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

As per the standard operating procedure, if a district commissioner receives information from the police or other sources that a person is suspected to be an “illegal immigrant”, the official will direct the person to produce evidence of his citizenship within 10 days, Sarma had at the time.

If the district commissioner finds that the evidence submitted is not satisfactory, he can pass an expulsion order by invoking the 1950 Act, ordering the removal of the undocumented immigrant from Assam “by giving 24 hours’ time and by the route so specified”.

In June, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma informed the Assembly that the state government was planning to invoke the 1950 law to “push back” more suspected foreigners.

Sarma had claimed that the expulsion of declared foreigners was justified in the legal framework provided by the Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

The chief minister had said that the Supreme Court in October 2024 upheld Section 6A of the 1955 Citizenship Act, which gave “sweeping powers to the Assam government” to act under the 1950 law and that a deputy commissioner has the power to evict any person if there is prima facie evidence of their being an “illegal foreigner”.

Section 6A was introduced as a special provision when the Assam Accord was signed between the Union government and leaders of the Assam Movement in 1985. It allows foreigners who came to Assam between January 1, 1966, and March 25, 1971, to seek Indian citizenship.

Indigenous groups in Assam have alleged that this provision in the Act has legalised infiltration by migrants from Bangladesh.

A brief history of the 1950 Act

Partition and subsequent communal riots had led to a movement of refugees and other migrants into Assam from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. According to a 2012 white paper by the Assam government, around five lakh migrants and refugees entered the state in the initial years.

As discontent grew about the migration, the Union government had brought in the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act to tackle the presence of alleged foreigners in the state.

The law empowered the government to expel “a person or a class of persons” who were “ordinarily resident outside India and have come into Assam, if it believes that their stay “is detrimental to the interests of the general public of India”.

However, the law gave relief to refugees fleeing Pakistan on account of “civil disturbances or fear of such disturbances”, given the context of Partition.

Between 1962 and 1964, the police began a crackdown on alleged foreigners.

The drive soon stirred up a storm. “The process of detection and deportation was so atrocious that … Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, an Asamiya Muslim, who was then finance minister of Assam, and later became Union minister and president of India, had to take up the issue of atrocities and inhuman torture meted out to the innocent Indian Muslim citizens,” wrote political scientist Monirul Hussian in his book Assam Movement: Class, Ideology and Identity.

Ahmed threatened to resign over the harassment of those wrongly accused of being foreigners.

According to the Assam government’s white paper on the foreigners’ matter, Pakistan also threatened to drag the issue of deportation to the United Nations.

Eventually, it was “decided by the central government that before eviction every individual case should be examined by judicial authority…to stand the test of scrutiny before the international forum”, the white paper said.

In effect, the contentious implementation of the 1950 legislation opened the doors to Assam’s most important citizenship determination mechanism – the foreigners tribunals. Four such tribunals were set up by a statutory order on September 23, 1964, and more were to follow.

Legal experts have argued that the Sarma government, by invoking the 1950 law, was dragging the state back to the days of arbitrary expulsions, without even the “fig leaf” of due process provided by the foreigners tribunals.

Also read: Why experts contest Assam CM’s use of 1950 law to justify forcing out people into Bangladesh

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